The Attic (a name which commemorates our first physical location) is, first and foremost, a site for the research students of the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester: a virtual community which aims to include all students, be they campus-based and full-time, or distance-learning and overseas. But we welcome contributions from students of museum studies - and allied subject areas - from outside the School and from around the world. Here you will find a lot of serious stuff, like exhibition and research seminar reviews, conference alerts and calls for papers, but there's also some 'fluff'; the things that inspire, distract and keep us going. After all, while we may be dead serious academic types, we're human too.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

CFP: Beyond camps and forced labour

From H-Museum:

CALL FOR PAPERS

Beyond camps and forced labour: current international research on survivors of Nazi persecution.Third international multidisciplinary conferenceImperial War Museum, London7-9 January 2009

This conference is planned as a follow-up to the two successful conferences, which took place at the Imperial War Museum in London in 2003 and 2006. It will continue to build on areas previously investigated, and also open up new fields of academic enquiry.

The aim is to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines who are engaged in research on all groups of survivors of Nazi persecution. These will include - but are not limited to - Jews, Gypsies and Slavonic people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, members of underground movements, the disabled, the so-called ‘racially impure’, and forced labourers. For the purpose of the conference, a ‘survivor’ is defined as anyone who suffered any form of persecution by the Nazis or their allies as a result of the Nazis’ racial, political, ideological or ethnic policies from 1933 to 1945, and who survived the Second World War.

The organisers welcome proposals, which focus on topics and themes of the ‘life after’, ranging from the experience of liberation to the trans-generational impact of persecution, individual and collective memory and consciousness, and questions of theory and methodology. We are alsointerested in comparative papers that discuss the experience of victims of forced population transfers during the war and in the immediate post-war years, including the historiographical development from polemical and memoirist approaches to empirical, analytical, and critical studies.

Please send an abstract of 200-250 words together with biographical background of about 50 words by 28 February 2008 to: Johannes-Dieter Steinert, email: J.D.Steinert@wlv.ac.uk

All proposals are subject to a review process.

Fees: No more than GBP135 for speakers. The fee includes admission to all panels and evening events, lunches, coffees and teas. Further information and registration details will be made available in 2008.

It is intended to publish the conference proceedings. The proceedings of the first conference have been published by Secolo Verlag, Osnabrück (ISBN 3-929979-73-x). The proceedings of the second conference are in press by Secolo Verlag as well. For further information please contact http://www.secolo-verlag.de/ or u.kuhlmann@agentur-sec.de.

The conference is being organised by

Suzanne Bardgett, Imperial War Museum, LondonDavid Cesarani, Royal Holloway, University of LondonJessica Reinisch, Birkbeck College LondonJohannes-Dieter Steinert, University of Wolverhampton

***STOP PRESS***

PhD Conferences

We have a new PhD conference upcoming this year November 5-6th 2013. It is called Museum Metamorphosis and is all about the adaptable and changing museums of today. We are sponsored by AHRC and in partnership with Leicester Museums. The official website and details can be found here.

Last year's PhD student conference was held March 27-28 2012, and was titled Museum Utopias; it was supported by the University of Leicester and Hanwell. It was an intreguing two days of utopic ideals and realities in museums today. Details are available on the official website. Read the blog for a session-by-session review of the conference.

The 2011 conference was held in Leicester March 28-30, and was called Curiouser & Curiouser; supported financially by the University of Leicester, it was an exciting three days of the weird and wonderful in heritage studies. Read the blog to find out more. We also held a highly successful PhD student symposium in December 2009. Read the blog.